It’s obviously not enough to create an account on Instagram and start shooting photos to share. Successful content marketers on this social platform tailor their content to take advantage of the channel’s strengths, from hashtags and Stories to advertising and live video.
Let’s explore how to use these features to maximize your content marketing strategy.
Powerful hashtags
You can use two types of hashtags in your Instagram campaigns – branded or community.
Branded hashtags make your post easier to find for people who already know your company and are looking to find out more about it. Branded hashtag examples from Bullet Journal, which has over 260,000 followers, include #bulletjournal #bulletjournaling, and #bulletjournalcollection.
Community hashtags are commonly used or created by Instagram users to follow a topic, interest, or other unifying theme. In the Bullet Journal example, community hashtags include #writing, #stationery, #plannermom.
TIP: Instagram limits users to 30 hashtags per post.
This Instagram post shows how Mercedes Benz uses hashtags.
Observe the hashtags Mercedes uses besides the branded ones: #GTfamily, #DreamCar, #Cartastic, #InstaCar, #Luxury, #Lifestyle, #Performance. The community following those hashtags is interested in vehicles or products fitting in those categories. This is how prospects can find your brand and how they relate to your products in a quick and easy way.
In The Ultimate Guide to Best Instagram Hashtags for Likes, Andrew Roach offers several tools to help generate effective community hashtags, including:
I like Display Purposes because I simply enter my topic and it generates a list of the most relevant existing hashtags.
Don’t want to spend time coming up with the perfect hashtags? Oberlo reports the 10 best hashtags for Instagram:
- #love
- #instagood
- #photooftheday
- #fashion
- #beautiful
- #happy
- #cute
- #tbt
- #like4like
- #followme
Dynamic Stories
The Stories feature allows you to interact more directly and transparently with your audience, but these Stories are deleted after 24 hours from the top of the feed. Nobody expects you to invest significant time and money to create content for such a short time. However, last year Instagram added a way for Stories to last forever. It now automatically saves your Stories in your archives. You can choose to share them again through Instagram’s Stories Highlights feature.
Instagram Stories help you grow your audience and keep it engaged with your brand because it allows you to keep your profile in their feeds not once but several times during each day. More Stories mean more chances to attract the audience’s attention.
Vogue Magazine uses Stories, such as this one from the presidential inauguration last…
